Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter?
Illustration: Mark Allen Miller
Had Narrative Science — a company that trains computers to write news stories—created this piece, it probably would not mention that the company’s Chicago headquarters lie only a long baseball toss from the Tribune newspaper building. Nor would it dwell on the fact that this potentially job-killing technology was incubated in part at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. Those ironies are obvious to a human. But not to a computer.
At least not yet.
For now consider this: Every 30 seconds or so, the algorithmic bull pen of Narrative Science, a 30-person company occupying a large room on the fringes of the Chicago Loop, extrudes a story whose very byline is a question of philosophical inquiry. The computer-written product could be a pennant-waving second-half update of a Big Ten basketball contest, a sober preview of a corporate earnings statement, or a blithe summary of the presidential horse race drawn from Twitter posts. The articles run on the websites of respected publishers like Forbes, as well as other Internet media powers (many of which are keeping their identities private). Niche news services hire Narrative Science to write updates for their subscribers, be they sports fans, small-cap investors, or fast-food franchise owners.
And the articles don’t read like robots wrote them:
Friona fell 10-8 to Boys Ranch in five innings on Monday at Friona despite racking up seven hits and eight runs. Friona was led by a flawless day at the dish by Hunter Sundre, who went 2-2 against Boys Ranch pitching. Sundre singled in the third inning and tripled in the fourth inning … Friona piled up the steals, swiping eight bags in all …
OK, it’s not Roger Angell. But the grandparents of a Little Leaguer would find this game summary—available on the web even before the two teams finished shaking hands—as welcome as anything on the sports pages. Narrative Science’s algorithms built the article using pitch-by-pitch game data that parents entered into an iPhone app called GameChanger. Last year the software produced nearly 400,000 accounts of Little League games. This year that number is expected to top 1.5 million.
Narrative Science’s CTO and cofounder, Kristian Hammond, works in a small office just a few feet away from the buzz of coders and engineers. To Hammond, these stories are only the first step toward what will eventually become a news universe dominated by computer-generated stories. How dominant? Last year at a small conference of journalists and technologists, I asked Hammond to predict what percentage of news would be written by computers in 15 years. At first he tried to duck the question, but with some prodding he sighed and gave in: “More than 90 percent.”
That’s when I decided to write this article, hoping to finish it before being scooped by a MacBook Air.
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World’s Largest McDonalds Built For London Olympics
The world’s largest McDonald’s restaurant is getting for the London Olympics this summer, with a seating capacity of more than 1,500. No word if McDonald’s believed ‘build the largest restaurant’ was going to be a medal occasion this year.
Super Bowl of Snacks Held at Meat Stadium
February 2nd, 2012
The Super Bowl is nearly upon us. That indicates that folks are getting prepared and purchasing their snacks. Wives and girlfriends are finding ready to bake all sorts of unique football treats for the guys. Nicely, you can all just stop. No matter what you do, this single-serving deli platter shaped like a football stadium has you beat.
Just quit now and throw in the towel. This thing is the Holy Grail of football food setups. Of course it won’t last far more than a handful of minutes if you have your football buddies over. Still, it is a operate of unhealthy artery clogging art and I wish I could dig into it correct now.
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16 Mobile Apps for Surviving Holiday ‘Fun’
An HTC Rezound, iPhone 4 and Nokia Lumia 800 celebrate the holidays. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired.com
The holidays are a smorgasbord of sensory overload. The traveling. The cooking. The shopping. Even the “quality” family time. It’s all packaged into two nightmarish rollercoasters scheduled at the blunt ends of November and December.
Luckily, however, if you’ve got a smartphone or tablet, you can get by with a little help from your app-based friends.
We’ve rounded up 16 apps to help you sail through the holidays problem-free. So, whether you’re traveling, cooking, entertaining the kiddies, or doing some serious credit card damage in the malls or online, here are some suggestions that should make this, well, “festive” time of the year just a bit more palatable.
Many of these apps are available on multiple platforms, so whether your poison is iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, or even webOS (yes, in some cases!), you’ll be covered.
Taking the stress out of holiday travel
Having to deal with the TSA is bad enough. The rest of your travel experience doesn’t need to be “stranger-groping-your-private-parts” bad, so check out these three apps for a bit of relief.
Hipmunk
Hipmunk is one of the best ways to find and compare flight plans that suit your schedule and budget.
The free Hipmunk app lets you quickly compare flight options based on either “agony level” (which takes into account total travel time and the number of stops), or by cost, departure time, and length of travel time. After choosing your departure and destination locations, the dates you’d like to travel, and how many people will be flying, the app lays out search results in an easy-to-read timeline.
Herein lies Hipmunk’s advantage over competitors: Suddenly, it’s easy to see exactly how long you’ll be in the air, what times you’ll take off and land, and, of course, the price of travel. All this, and the app directly compares options from numerous other airlines.
Other travel apps, such as Kayak, offer a more all-in-one approach to travel planning and organization, but I think Hipmunk’s straightforward layout makes it a superior option for flight searches. It should be noted, though, that Hipmunk is strictly for finding flights — you can’t make purchases from within the app. And some airlines, like Southwest, don’t allow their flights to be booked through third-party sites, so you won’t see them on Hipmunk or other travel-related apps.
Hipmunk is available for iPhone, iPad, and Android devices.
(It’s also worth noting that Alexis Ohanian — co-founder of Wired.com’s sister site, Reddit — is employed by Hipmunk.)
TripIt
Once you’ve made your travel arrangements, you can use TripIt to keep your flight, rental car, and hotel reservation information in one convenient place.
After signing up and syncing your e-mail account(s), you can use the TripIt website to set up automatic travel plan importing, so the TripIt app is always up to date with confirmations heading to your inbox. Alternatively, you can manually send flight info to your TripIt account via e-mail.
This free app is primarily a portal for accessing your trip information in a single place, but you can also check into your flight, check your flight status, and download airport information, such as terminal maps. The TripIt layout is straightforward, so you can easily double-check flight, gate and terminal info at a glance.
TripIt does require a lot of integration with its website, but because you’ll likely be making reservations on a computer rather than in-app, it’s not too big of an inconvenience. You can edit confirmation details in-app, but to add people to your network, manage profile preferences, or adjust e-mail settings, you’ll have to visit the TripIt website.
You can get TripIt on iOS, Android, Windows Phone 7 and BlackBerry.
GasBuddy
Have you decided to road-trip rather than plane-trip? Use GasBuddy to find the cheapest and/or closest gas stations during your trek down the interstate.
If you’re the type to meticulously plan out a trip beforehand, you can plan your pit stops by searching gas stations by city, state, or zip code. This exercise also gives you inside knowledge of the cheapest gas spots along your trip. But no worries if you’re more of a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-fuel-tank kind of guy. When your fuel gauge is teetering near empty, just launch the app and hit the big “Find Gas Near Me” button to see where the nearest stations are.
You can order stations by distance or price. You can also see them in list format, or laid out on a map.
As a bonus, the free GasBuddy app awards points for reporting gas station prices, and if you earn enough points, you’ll be entered into a weekly drawing for free gas. And, who knows, if you’ve got kids in the back seat, maybe you can turn this into a game: While you’re at the wheel, let them scour the roadsides and submit prices through the app. Hey, it’s worth a shot, right?
GasBuddy is available through the App Store, Android Market, Windows Phone Marketplace, and BlackBerry AppWorld.
Brave New Thermostat: How the iPod’s Creator Is Making Home Heating Sexy
“You’re going to build a what?”
That’s what Tony Fadell’s wife, Dani, said to him in 2009 when he told her his idea for a new company. Fadell is one of the most sought-after talents in the world of gadgetry—he designed the hardware for the iPod, and headed Apple’s iPod and iPhone division before leaving his VP post to spend time with his wife and two young children, living an idyllic year in Paris.
But even before he moved back to the U.S. he was mulling over his next step. Many assumed that the 42-year old technologist would continue his brilliant career in consumer electronics. He might even become a contender to run an existing multi-billion dollar business—in electronics, in mobile, maybe even Apple.
Instead, he told Dani, he was going to build a thermostat.
A what?
Fadell explained his concept: Untold tons of carbon were being pumped into the air, with people losing billions of dollars in energy costs, all because there was no easy, automatic way to control the temperature. But what if you could apply all the skills and brilliance of Silicon Valley to produce a thermostat that was smart, thrifty and so delightful that saving energy was as much fun as shuffling an iTunes playlist?
You could revolutionize an important but neglected tech backwater—and significantly improve the environment. Within 15 minutes, Dani got it. As did the others Fadell would talk to over the next few months. These included a dream team of Silicon Valley engineers, designers, and computer scientists who became the first employees of Nest Labs, the company Fadell founded.
Investors were equally enthusiastic, and though Nest won’t disclose the size of the total stake, it is reasonable to assume that upwards of $ 50 million has come from a consortium that includes Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, Lightspeed Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Intertrust, and Generation Investment Management (backed by Al Gore, who was enchanted with a demo that Fadell gave him at TED in 2011.)
“In other green startups, ideas are incremental—we haven’t found breakthrough ideas,” says Kleiner Perkins partner Randy Komisar. “But this breaks the mold.”
Today comes the payoff, when Tony Fadell’s company introduces the Nest Learning Thermostat. It is available for preorder at Best Buy and Nest.com, and will ship in November. Units are already streaming from assembly lines in the Chinese factories that churn out advanced digital gadgets.
The Nest is the iPod of thermostats. A simple loop of brushed stainless steel encases a chassis of reflective polymer, which encircles a crisp color digital display. Artificial intelligence figures out when to turn down the heat and when to jack up the air conditioning, so that you don’t waste money and perturb the ozone when no one is home, or when you’re asleep upstairs. You can communicate with the Nest from your smartphone, tablet or web browser.
Fadell promises the Nest will pay for itself within a year or two of use, and ultimately save you up to 30 percent of your utility bill. And its presence on your wall will be less an artifact of the industrial age than a piece of high-tech art.
Can the unloved thermostat become an object of techo-lust? Will the Nest really save its users an aggregate billions of dollars? Can it spare our beloved pale blue dot endless tons of unwanted carbon?
Tony Fadell is about to find out.
Huge Martian caves could be our first home on the red planet
One of the spacecraft orbiting Mars has snapped some pictures of what could be the entrances to huge caves. You may be looking at the future site of our first Mars colony.
These big black pits were first spotted a year ago, but last month, the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was able to take some high resolution images of the site. By overexposing the surface, the camera was able to see down into the pits. To give you a sense of scale, the smallest objects you can see in these images are about three feet across, and the pit in this image is about the size of a football field:
Researchers think that these are probably pit craters, which form when the ceiling of an empty lava chamber collapses. They may not necessarily be part of a lava tube or cave system, and it’s hard to tell for sure from the pictures. But even if there isn’t a cave system there, there are some good reasons to live underground on Mars, especially if you’re going to be there for a while. In addition to making it easier to regulate temperature, being surrounded by a whole bunch of rock helps to keep radiation to a minimum.
OhGizmo! Review – SumoSac Couple
By Chris Scott Barr
When it comes to living room seating, most people go for the usual pieces of furniture. These generally being a couch, loveseat, recliner and/or some other type of chair. Sure, couches are great because they seat multiple people, and allow for sleeping when needed. Recliners are nice if you want to lay back and watch TV without having to lie on your side the whole time. However, there is one piece of unconventional furniture that can do all of these things. That’s right, I’m talking about a bean bag.
There’s a chance that you had a bean bag when you were younger. They were great for sitting in front of the TV while watching movies or playing video games. Unfortunately, most such pieces of furniture never really lasted all that long. Over time the little beans lose their shape and the whole thing begins to fall, until your favorite seat is the most uncomfortable one in the house. Well in case you hadn’t heard, there’s a new bean bag out there, one not actually filled with tiny beans at all.
Sumo has actually been making their bean bag chairs for several years now, so I wouldn’t exactly call them new. However, they’re still interesting enough to warrant a review. They shipped us over one of their ‘SumoSac Couple’ chairs, which I have been lounging on for a couple of weeks now. Luckily I needn’t get out of it to write this piece.
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